Resilient

Black cottonwoods trees amaze me. They are hard to manage in a yard because they grow like crazy, but as an example of resilience, they are truly a marvel of God’s creative genius. Why do I say this? The other day I was loading up a bunch of branches that we cut up after our November “bomb cyclone” and found several branches with new growth on them.

“So?,” you say. Think about this. These branches, each only a couple of feet long, have been disconnected from a trunk or root system of any kind for 4 months and in the dead of winter. Now they are sprouting leaves and still without a root system. Do some reading on black cottonwoods, they are amazing at regenerating. That is what I call resilience!

Resilience is a necessary component of the Christian life as well. We experience disappointment, we experience loss, we experience our own sinfulness, we experience harm from others, we experience spiritual warfare. In each case, the encouragement from Scripture, and from the testimony of the Church, is to press on. The New Testament has a lot to say about endurance and perseverance (Hebrews 10:36 is one pretty clear statement, “for you have need of endurance…”). I think that resilience is a companion principle, perhaps an essential element, to endurance and perseverance. How can we endure if we can’t recover from challenges and failures?

Like endurance and perseverance, I believe that resilience is a practice. If I am correct, then, we need to be able to identify and practice the set of disciplines that aid us in resilience. This all begins for me with a set of verses that has been a point of reflection for most of my life: Proverbs 3:5-8:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and turn away from evil. It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones.

Pursue Christ – He is enough,

            Pastor Jeff

On Christmas Trees

I was taking out our Christmas Tree and throwing it on the rubbish pile with the branches left over from the November storms. I had taken a walk the night before and seen in some neighbors’ windows the still decorated artificial trees up and with lights on. The contrast struck me.

I imagine that some folks are leaving their trees up to “extend the season” or keep the sentiment of the season alive somehow. The difference between using an artificial tree to prop up a feeling versus the fact of a real, cut tree dying and needing to be removed is pretty significant. I wonder if it’s not a metaphor for life.

For our family, cutting down a live tree (or buying a recently cut tree live tree) and decorating it is a tradition. One key issue with a live tree is that no matter how hard I work at it, it eventually dries up and starts losing its needles. Sometimes the tree lasts well past Christmas, but it always eventually must come down. We enjoy the look of the tree while it is up (and the smell of the tree, too). We enjoy the lights and the decorations. But, it’s temporary.

That’s the way it is with life, too. Our life here is temporary. We can enjoy things about this life, we put effort into making this life positive and even delightful, but it’s temporary. I think many people invest in life like an artificial tree, with the illusion that it can just keep going.

The Bible actually has something significant to say about this. Whether is it the words of Jesus, Himself, that we are not to be anxious about the stuff of life, but keep our focus on the Kingdom of God (Matthew 6:25-33) or the Apostle John saying that that if we love this world then the love of God is not in us (1 John 2:15-17), Scripture tells us that the “stage” for our current of life is not to be our primary focus.

I wonder, sometimes, if part of our struggle as contemporary American Christians is that we moved from “too spiritually minded to be any earthly good” to trying to be “relevant” but really wound up simply opening the door for worldliness, that is love for this life as opposed to living in the reality there is an unseen world that is eternal and is our true home. We, perhaps, need to think more about the fact that there is a real heaven and a real hell and people are going to populate one or the other for all eternity based on their faith in Jesus Christ.

Maybe it’s time to reclaim a stronger emphasis on “seeking first the Kingdom of God,” both in evangelism and in the daily life of discipleship.

Pursue Christ – He is enough,

            Pastor Jeff

PS – Just so there is no confusion, I am not advocating live Christmas trees over artificial ones for your personal family Christmas. 😊